What's the 'environment' task in Rake?

Question

According to \"Custom Rake Tasks\":

desc \"Pick a random user as the winner\"
task :winner => :environment do
  puts \"Winner: #{pick(User).name}\"
end
         


        

Answer 1

It loads in your Rails environment so you can actually use your models and what not. Otherwise, it has no idea about those things.

So if you made a task that just did puts "HI!" then you don't need to add the :environment task to the dependencies. But if you wish to do something like User.find(1) well that will need it.